🖤 How to Stop (Doom) Scrolling
Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients. Hello, and welcome to off the grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all of your friends, your clients, your community, or your income. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And very recently, I became the published author of Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media. In fact, as you're hearing this today, I am hosting a beautiful virtual retreat for folks who bought the book in the first month that it came out.
Amelia Hruby:Thank you so much to you if that's you. And so here on the pod feed, I'm offering a mini episode that came from the workshop that I'm teaching today at the retreat, which is called how to feel better on the Internet. And as I was exploring that topic and thinking about what I wanted to teach and offer and share, I realized that there was kind of a niche within it, which was about doom scrolling. And I also realized that this week, it has now been one year since Donald Trump was elected president again in The United States, and that has meant that it's been one year of witnessing horrible atrocities and failures of leadership and the rise of both a value system and a commitment to political violence that is harrowing and horrifying. And I don't always speak about politics here on the podcast, but I try to make sure that our values are explicit and bring things up implicitly.
Amelia Hruby:And a year ago, I shared episode that I called let me be crystal clear. And I spoke to the fact that I hated the ways that Trump's presidency was being presented as good for business and how that type of business was everything that I stand against in the way that I do business at Softer Sounds and the way that we think about business together here at Off The Grid. And looking back at that episode, I feel like my anger is even sharper and stronger than it was a year ago now that I've seen everything that Trump and his cabinet and his supporters are doing. So I wanted to recognize that here. I wanted to take a moment to say that this podcast and myself and the listeners I invite to the show, we stand with Palestine.
Amelia Hruby:We stand with trans folks and our beloved trans community. We stand with all queer folks and support queer love in every iteration. We stand with the anarchists and the rebels and the quote unquote radical leftists. We stand with the anti capitalists. We stand with BIPOC communities.
Amelia Hruby:We stand with the chronically ill and disabled. We stand with immigrants, and we stand against transphobia, fatphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. We stand against deportation. We stand against MAGA rhetoric. We stand against anti vax movements.
Amelia Hruby:We stand against prisons. We stand against borders, and we stand against the current US president. I think it's somewhat precarious to say that right now, but it feels very important to say. And as I share this episode about how to quit doom scrolling, I also want to be clear that I am not supporting a sort of privileged retreat from the world in which we are implicitly claiming that the world's problems are not our problems. And off the grid, we may be going off the grid, but we are still very much embedded in our communities and embedded in the world that we live in, both the society and politics of that world and the ecology and nature of that world.
Amelia Hruby:And so I do want us to stop doomscrolling because I don't think that doomscrolling is a generative intervention in bringing about the change I hope to see in our world. But I also always encourage raising our political awareness and our feminist consciousness as we do this work. So thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. Thank you for buying a copy of my book, Your Attention is Sacred except on social media. If you're at the retreat today, thank you for being one of my friends, fans, and super fans for supporting my work and helping me continue to do this.
Amelia Hruby:And now let's dive in, shall we, to this conversation about how to stop doom scrolling and otherwise change your phone habits. If you're listening to this podcast, I assume you've heard of doomscrolling or you know what it is, but I do want to just define terms as always and say that according to Wikipedia, doomscrolling is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of user generated content or news, particularly negative news on the web and social media. So doom scrolling is a pattern that I hear from many, many off the grid listeners and interweb members. And it's something I completely understand during this era of poly crisis, during this time when there are wars ongoing, genocides ongoing, when we're seeing more and more mass shootings, more and more public health issues, and just feeling more and more tired, exhausted, stressed, overwhelmed, I think that it is relatively common to pick up your phone and open social media or open a news app and just start scrolling through all of the things that are wrong with the world. I have some theories of why we might do this, but I think that's a conversation best kept between you and your therapist.
Amelia Hruby:So in this mini episode, I just want to offer two practices for becoming more aware of how you are using your phone and how social media or news apps are making you feel. So this episode is for you if you ever find yourself doom scrolling and you really don't want to anymore, or if you just noticed that you are picking up your phone more than ever and you would like to interrupt that pattern. I want to give you two simple practices that will help you gain more awareness around how you are spending time online or on your phone, and then a few ideas for how to shift your habits once you cultivate that awareness. So let's start with these noticing practices. The first practice goes like this.
Amelia Hruby:I want to invite you to open up a new note on your phone and title it something like your phone pickup journal. Once you got that note ready, what you're going to do for one whole day is every time you pick up your phone, you're gonna pick it up, unlock it. And then the first thing you're gonna go to is that phone note to write down why you picked up your phone. What did you pick it up to do? Was there a notification that prompted you?
Amelia Hruby:Was there a thought or a question you had? Or was it really unconscious or subconscious? And you open your phone, you're like, why did I even pick up my phone? By going to that note first, one, you interrupt this pattern of picking up your phone without thinking about it, if that's a pattern that you have. And two, you start to create this log of noticing reasons you're picking up your phone.
Amelia Hruby:And once you have that log, you can start to consider, okay, what do I think of these reasons? Are they reasons I do want to turn to my phone? Am I perhaps turning to my phone for all sorts of things that it won't actually help me with? Like, if I'm having a weird feeling and I pick up my phone because there's a New York Times app notification, am I realizing that just makes my weird feeling worse? We can start to build this awareness and interrupt this pattern by adding this gentle simple check of when you open the phone, you go to the note, and you write down why you're there.
Amelia Hruby:When I did this for twenty four hours myself, what I noticed is that I basically pick up my phone every time I have a feeling. I basically pick up my phone every time I am out and about in the world. And noticing that helped me start to think about what role do I actually want my phone to play in my life and what purpose do I think it serves? So once you have your log of all of the times and reasons you picked up your phone in a day, then you can start to ask yourself questions like that. What are the most common reasons I picked up my phone?
Amelia Hruby:What are the feelings I associated with picking up my phone in these notes? How do I want to use my phone? What purpose do I think my phone serves in my life and what purpose do I want it to serve? I wanna encourage you to be gentle with yourself, but also honest in this noticing practice. Now I wanna offer you a practice that is more specifically about scrolling.
Amelia Hruby:This is a practice that I first learned from my friend, Taylor Elise Morrison, and have since adapted and expanded in my own ways. But for this one, you are going to want your phone or computer if you know that you have a news site bookmarked and you just go there to scroll and scroll and scroll, that could work too. But for most of us, I think it's gonna be our phone and then a piece of paper or a journal and something to write with. And what you're going to do is set a timer for five minutes and then open your scrolling app or platform of choice and begin scrolling. Every time a post or an article or headline attracts your attention and you pause to read it, I want you to write down what that was and how it made you feel.
Amelia Hruby:So again, you're just gonna be scrolling. But when you naturally pause, you're gonna extend to that pause and write down what did I see and how did it make me feel. And then you're gonna keep scrolling. And you're gonna continue this practice of scrolling, pausing, noticing, and writing it down for five minutes. You're gonna do that.
Amelia Hruby:Just keep going. Keep going. And when your timer goes off, you're gonna stop. I'm gonna invite you to take a little stretch, look away from your screen for a moment, and then you're gonna go to those notes, and you're going to start to notice patterns there. Ask yourself questions like, what are the types of things that you saw?
Amelia Hruby:How did they make you feel? What were your most common feelings? And then we can even get a little more reflective or meta about it and ask things like, how do you feel about seeing this list of feelings? What are you noticing about what you noticed? And I'm also curious, how did you feel at the end of the five minutes?
Amelia Hruby:Did you want to keep scrolling? Did you feel like the five minutes was insufferably long? Were you feeling uplifted? Were you feeling stressed or overwhelmed? Again, this is all a noticing practice, but I think that more mindfully scrolling is a first step toward the awareness we need to change our tech habits and behavioral patterns.
Amelia Hruby:And remember, the people who own these social media apps and news apps and other apps on which we scroll and doom scroll, they are expert level behavioral manipulators. They have spent a lot of time, energy, and money figuring out how to keep us scrolling and how to keep us not thinking about our scrolling. They've spent a lot of time trying to get us to pick up our phone all the time and keep doing that without questioning it. So these two practices that I've offered you, the phone pickup journal and the five minutes of mindful scrolling, they are key practices for me in raising my awareness around how I use my phone and how I scroll. Obviously, if you listen to this podcast, you know that I'm not scrolling on social media.
Amelia Hruby:But let me tell you, a girl can doom scroll in the New York Times app as well. It is quite possible. So with these awareness practices that I've offered, how do we turn that awareness into quitting doom scrolling or changing our social media habits? Well, here I want to offer you two b's, two things that start with the letter b to help you begin these shifts. And before I do that, I just wanna say that I always believe that it is up to each of us to decide how we want to engage with our tech, how we want to spend time on or off of our phones.
Amelia Hruby:And so I think this is a really personal question. I am never judging your phone use or your social media use or your scrolling habits. So as you continue this, please know that I'm just trying to offer two resources for changing your behavior if you want to. So the two b's. The first b is boundaries.
Amelia Hruby:I wanna invite you to check-in with your phone boundaries or your tech boundaries. Now boundaries can look like setting a timer for using certain apps. You can do that on your phone by putting limits on different apps, either in your iPhone settings or by using a third party app to set those limits. Or you could set boundaries like turning off notifications, deleting the app from your home screen, or you could even put your phone in another area of your home for a few hours each day. You could commit to not looking at your phone until after 12PM, whatever feels right for you.
Amelia Hruby:I think that the first step toward changing your behavior with your phone and social media is to check-in with your boundaries. The second b is to check-in with your body. I think that one of the real dangers of doom scrolling is the way that it can overwhelm our nervous system and lead us into a sort of numb feeling, almost dissociative state. And I was reading a very small, very, like, early science. I probably shouldn't even be citing it study about doomscrolling and dissociation.
Amelia Hruby:And it found that the longer we're scrolling, the less we retain what we're seeing. And I think that in the case of doom scrolling, that can often mean that, like, we're getting the hit of the negative feeling from what we see, but we don't even know what we saw after we scroll past it. And so we're just flooding our system with negative feeling after negative feeling after negative feeling, and that has an impact in our body. So for our second intervention or check-in, again, I wanna encourage us to check-in with our bodies. I think that one of the best ways to break a tech habit is to pull back from the online world and into the offline world in that moment.
Amelia Hruby:And when I do that, I like to offer myself, my body, something pleasurable so that I start to associate pleasure with putting my phone down instead of associating pleasure with picking my phone up. So when I check-in with my body, I'm asking myself, okay, how am I feeling as I am scrolling or looking at this news? And then I like to close the laptop, put down the phone, and do something that feels good in my body and for my body. So that might be a stretch, that might be grabbing a glass of water, that might be eating a piece of chocolate or a sweet or a salty thing if that's your thing. But I have really been working on teaching my body that there is more pleasure to be found in putting my phone down and stepping away from screens than to be found in leaning into the screens.
Amelia Hruby:And let me be clear. I love being online. I love the internet. But I have found during this very intense year on every level, it's intense globally, nationally, locally. It's intense politically, personally, communally.
Amelia Hruby:And during that time, I have found that I really have to take care of myself to not distract myself, numb myself, and dissociate through the Internet, which is not my favorite way to be online. So just to quickly recap, I offered you two practices to raise your awareness around how you are using your tech, A practice for tracking when and why you're picking up your phone and mindfully scrolling to know how social media or a news app, what it's showing you and how it's making you feel. And then I offered you the two Bs to begin to shift your patterns. I encourage you to set some boundaries and to check-in with your body and create new feedback loops of finding pleasure in putting your phone down. Or as the off the grid theme song says, I know that you really want to put your phone away.
Amelia Hruby:Hey. And because that is our motto around here, I feel like this episode will help you get what you want, which is to stop doom scrolling, to disconnect from social media, and to step back into the pleasure that you can find in your life online and offline. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode. If you enjoyed it, I hope that you will buy a copy of my book, Your Attention is Sacred except on Social Media. And I also want to recommend here another book that is specifically about phone usage and breaking patterns and habits around your phone.
Amelia Hruby:And that book is How to Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price. So I will link that in the show notes as well in addition to that study I mentioned and a few other links to continue exploring this work. Thank you again for tuning in, and until next time, I will see you off the grid. Thanks for listening to off the grid. Don't forget to grab your free leaving social media toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit.
Amelia Hruby:This podcast is a softer sounds production. Production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter of Making Audio Magic, and our logo is by Natalia Studio. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And until next time, I'll see you off the grid and on the interweb.
Amelia Hruby:The grid bed.
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